Discover The Glamorous Mondrian Doha Hotel Decorated By Marcel Wanders ⇒ Designed by local firm South West Architecture for the hospitality company SBE, the Mondrian Doha Hotel opened in October 2017, in Qatar. The five-star hotel is even shortlisted in the Event Spaces category at the upcoming AHEAD MEA 2018 awards. Dutch designer Marcel Wanders was responsible for the interior design of the 270 rooms, give the hotel a touch of his distinctive, whimsical style.

Wanders’ Amsterdam-based studio created the interiors for the 270-room hotel, which features a number of grand, extravagant spaces in his distinctive maximalist style. “The whole hotel is a place of fantasy and surprise,” says Wanders. “It’s really a space that is made for theatre.”

The hotel features a large atrium and lobby space filled with giant white lamps and a black helical staircasethat has a balustrade with an ornate cut-out pattern, which extends up over four floors. The tea room features illuminated white trees and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, while the swimming pool is covered by a floral-patterned stained-glass dome. Other notable spaces include a 2,000-square-metre, 18-metre-high ballroom, while every room in the hotel enjoys a view over the nearby lagoon.

The Mondrian Doha is the second Mondrian hotel Wanders has designed, following the Mondrian South Beach in Miami, which opened in December 2008. Wanders says his team took design elements that were successful in the original Miami hotel and combined them with references to the hotel’s local context.

“Doha is a very different place with a different culture,” Wanders explains. “We revisited quite a few of the important icons that we made for Miami and we put them to work again in Doha. For the rest, of course, there is a lot of local inspiration.”

Wanders created a shisha lounge that is almost entirely black and white but features hundreds of colourful glass lanterns suspended from the ceiling. “Normally you see these lights in shisha places, but we have so many it’s crazy,” Wanders says, explaining that his aim was to create a hotel that foreign travellers would enjoy, but which would also become a destination for locals.

“We wanted to make a hotel that, while being new, feels very authentic,” he says. “At the end, it’s not only a destination for people that fly to Doha, but it’s a place that is really visited by local people.”

The Mondrian Doha hotel is up against a number of other five-star hotels in the Event Spaces category at the upcoming AHEAD MEA 2018 awards, including the Four Seasons in Kuwait and the Bulgari Resort in Dubai. Tickets for the awards ceremony, which takes place at The Meydan Hotel in Dubai on 14 November 2018, are still available.